Last month the Championship Gaming Series, a new professional gaming league owned by DirecTV, made a rather audacious splash by holding its first ever live draft at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills. Last night, the first CGS season for North America came to an end as the Chicago Chimera won the first CGS title by defeating the Carolina Core 22-21 in a series of matches that were broadcast live on DirecTV’s “The 101” channel.
Chicago Chimera GM Brian Flander celebrates with the CGS trophy Monday night.
I watched the CGS championship matches last night on The 101, and overall the broadcast was not bad. The presentation and theatrics were a little hammy, and the show occasionally seemed like a WWE event – lots of drama and trash-talking that didn’t seem remotely genuine. However, the broadcast team of DJ Wheat, Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel and Paul “ReDeYe” Chaloner did an excellent job commentating on the matches and the video game action was surprisingly easy to follow. Plus, the tension toward the end of the championship bout was 100 percent authentic (I’ll have a more detailed rundown of the CGS broadcast later).
Chicago, which had been number one in the standings for much of the season, feel behind 12-4 early after losing to Carolina in Dead of Alive 4 female (2-5), FIFA (0-2) and DOA male (5-2). But Chicago stormed back, thanks to its Counter-Strike: Source squad, which posted a dominating 13-5 win over Carolina’s Counter-Strike team. That evened the score at 17-all going into the final match for Project Gotham Racing 3, which is Chicago’s biggest strength. Chimera’s dominant PGR team of Wesley “Ch0mpr” Cwiklo and Jason “Jason X” Exelby beat out Carolina 5-4 to win the title by the overall score of 22-21. “I thought we were out of it,” Chicago general manager Brian Flander said in a press statement. “But our Counter-Strike guys really showed up for us tonight and the PGR team finished it off. This is just unbelievable.”
Cwiklo and Exelby were voted the league MVPs. The Chicago Chimera receives an additional $100,000 team bonus on top of their salaries for the win and their overall record improves to 10-4. Both teams go on to the global CGS finals to be held in Los Angeles this November.
It will be interesting to see how much of television audience the CGS finals earned. I saw several TV commercials and other promotions for it leading up to the actual event. I think pro gaming certainly has legs, even though I don’t have much interest in games like FIFA, PGR and DOA. And I think the CGS had done a pretty good job so far, despite some flaws, making pro gaming look and feel more like a real pro sport. Time will tell if they can grow the league and gain enough interest from skeptical gamers to make it work.
